Sunday, February 16, 2014

Exploration 4- Anne

I really enjoyed the documentary, Fresh. I thought that it was very interesting, especially because I have seen a number of other documentaries that were similar to this one. I liked how they opened the film with the quote, "American's fear only one thing: inconvenience." I have never thought about this, but now that I have, it is so true. American's eat so much fast food, because it is convenient and fast. American's rely on often frozen breakfast, lunch, and dinner, because it is convenient. These foods have little nutrition in them and are not good to be eating on a daily basis. Everyone is way too busy to make food, let alone actually think about the process that the food that they are eating goes through before it gets to them. I think Fresh did a good job of illustrating this process.

Something that was very eye-opening to me, was how the movie showed multiple times, so many animals crammed into such a small space, where they did not have room to roam freely, let alone even move at all. It stressed that all industry farms have the same goal of making their animals grow as big as they can, as fast as they can, and they will do anything to make this happen, so that they can make money as much money as possible. When the farmers were asked what is in the food that they were feeding to their animals, they weren't even sure. This shows how little the farmers care about their animals, and really, the people and places that they are selling them to, also. This is not healthy. It showed the sick, distorted-looking animals, which are the way that they are as a result of the farm conditions and the way that they are poorly taken care of. This really grosses me out that these are the things people eat everyday.

On the other hand, the documentary showed the smaller, family owned farms which gave me more of a hope for the world. It was refreshing to see animals on farms with lots of space for them to move around, and it was interesting to hear about how these farmers grass feed their animals instead of corn feed and refrain from spraying their crops with pesticides. I thought the part where they talked about the need for different animals on a farm was interesting, and how they talked about the way they rotate certain animals locations every other day, or so, which makes things on the farm work in a natural way. This is instead of using the monoculture method, and using antibiotics to keep things alive.

This really opened my eyes and makes me believe that I should really monitor the foods that I put into my body. I am definitely going to start paying more attention and putting more effort into especially making healthy food at home, instead of eating out all the time.